I've been hitting a wall with the second Afflicted scenario in the Legendary campaign, "Lend a Helping Hand". How do you beat this? No matter what I try, I only manage to take 5 cities, plus one of the gold mines - and that's not enough to raise 90k.

Plus, if I try to save the game so I can explore possibilities, the Elf cities turn to Afflicted. I guess this is a bug, so I'd like to beat it without it (though I didn't even manage to win vs the Afflicted).

(Don't read any further unless you want some pointers on how to beat this mission)

I managed to beat it on my first try when I played it just now, but then again, I suppose I have an advantage -- I did design the mission. =)

The way that I balanced the criteria for this mission was to play through it a few times, take my highest income, and round it down. As it's one of the last missions in the game, it's definitely supposed to be a challenge!

Some tips:
I built only hags for the first 5 turns or so, except for 1 leper to sit on the bottom-left gold mine.

Hags are great on this map because of all of the mountains (Hags penetrate that defense) and because their high influence lets them quickly take cities.

On the first turn, I moved the Prophet straight up to the city above the capitol.

Try to keep units (Hags are ideal) on the gold mines.

After a certain point (turn 9-ish or so), you should have critical mass with units, and shouldn't need to build units anymore to keep the upper hand.

By turn 10, I'd held 5 cities for a while, and had a hag and a prophet on 2 more cities respectively. I had a clear unit advantage on the board. I'd saved a tiny bit of money, but not much

By the end of turn 15, I had $41600, 8 cities, 4 gold mines (w/ hags on each) and the AI was down to 3 units, 2 of them heavily wounded.

On the beginning of turn 19, I had $90,600 and won. Next turn I would have earned another $13,000, so I was able to clear it with a fair margin. It's definitely beatable!

I used mostly Hags with just a splash of Lepers (to lower stats and help get some clean-up kills.) I didn't build any Plaguebearers or Missionaries for this particular mission. (Those are great units, but not so much when you're in a hurry!)